When Costner Was King: An Actor’s Rise and Fall (and Rise?)

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I’ve never really believed in God, but for a brief time in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Kevin Costner came pretty close. Last weekend, Costner won an Emmy for his lead role in the History Channel miniseries, Hatfield & McCoys, his first major prize since the 1991 Academy Awards where he took home Best Director and Best Picture for Dances with Wolves. At the time, he seemed poised for many, many more.

Twenty-five years ago this summer, those titans of testosterone, Brian De Palma and David Mamet, teamed up to deliver a film adaptation the Camelot-era television series, The Untouchables. With marquee names like Sean Connery and Robert DeNiro in supporting roles, the lead role of famous lawman Eliot Ness was given to a then relatively unknown Costner. Barely into his 30s at the time, this film would kick off one of the most impressive runs in the history of American cinema. Just two months after The Untouchables, the Cold War thriller No Way Out debuted to both box office and wide critical success. On the popular online review database Rotten Tomatoes, No Way Out maintains an amazing 97 percent approval rate. To put that in perspective, that’s better than The Graduate (88 percent) and just shy of The Godfather, Part II (98 percent). Famously cut from The Big Chill in 1983, and more visible in a commercial that same year for Apple’s failed “Lisa” computer, by Labor Day 1987, Kevin Costner was a household name.

I had just turned seven when Costner broke big. In 1952, when my father was the same age, Gene Kelly was singing in the rain while Gary Cooper watched the clock in High Noon. Films like The Untouchables, No Way Out, and Bull Durham (released June 1988) were all a bit mature for my innocent eyes. But with 1989’s Field of Dreams, my Costner man crush truly began. I honestly don’t remember seeing it in the theater. It must have been VHS. Either way, I remember the feeling. That film, pie-in-the-sky as it may be, still gets me. For many years I told myself that I would eventually make the trip to Iowa and visit the real “Field of Dreams.” It was the closest thing I’ve ever had to Mecca. In September of 2002, just after my 22nd birthday, I led an impromptu road trip to Iowa with a couple of my female coworkers. None of us knew each other very well, but it was just the kind of spontaneous thing that makes being 22 so great. We ate cheap food, slept in questionable motels, and attempted to solve the mysteries of the universe through conversation and hipster music. I’m not certain if it was part of their original plan, but after the first couple of days, the girls talked me out of visiting “the field.” We opted for the urban pleasures (shopping) of Chicago. I might still be bitter about the whole experience had I not fallen in love with and subsequently married one of them. I tease her about it to this day. It’s still there. I could go. But for some reason that I can’t fully explain, I don’t need to anymore.

In October 1975, Bruce Springsteen famously appeared concurrently on the covers of Time and Newsweek. After two consecutive commercial failures and his career on the line, Born to Run made “Bruce Springsteen” possible. In much the same way, though with a bit more success behind him, Kevin Costner appeared on the June 26, 1989 cover of Time. Looking into the distance, his eyes on the proverbial prize, Costner’s face somehow lives up to the magazine’s hyperbolic headline, “The new American hero — smart, sexy, and on a roll.” Big words. Big expectations. Little more than a year later, Rolling Stone would declare him, “An American Classic.”

At the 62nd Academy Awards on March 26, 1990, Field of Dreams went 0 for 3, losing Best Score (The Little Mermaid), Best Adapted Screenplay (Driving Miss Daisy), and Best Picture (again, Driving Miss Daisy). At the 63rd Academy Awards, Costner faired a bit better. Dances with Wolves, his directorial debut, was the fourth highest-grossing film of 1990 ($424 million) behind Ghost, Home Alone, and Pretty Woman. It would go on to win seven Oscars including Best Director and Best Picture. Say what you will in retrospect, but this was a BIG film, one of those event movies that everyone, even 5th grade kids (this one at least) were talking about. Think Titanic. Think The Dark Knight. Costner was able to do this with an often-subtitled Civil War-era film about Native Americans. No small feat.

1991. The Gulf War. Nirvana. Magic Johnson’s HIV. JFK. Half a decade after bursting onto the scene as do-gooder Eliot Ness, Costner returned to crusade for justice as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s controversial film on the events of November 22, 1963. That summer, with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Costner gave us a fun if forgettable summer adventure. But few were ready for the cultural phenomenon that was JFK. Even Seinfeld referenced the “Magic Bullet Theory.” Having recently re-watched this film for the first time in years, I was shocked at how well it’s held up over the past two decades. JFK was the sixth highest-grossing film of 1991, taking in more than $200 million. For a 189-minute film about conspiracy theories and legal minutia, this is utterly amazing. Much of the success can be chalked up to the buzz and controversy, but my money’s on Costner. By this point, he’d crossed that invisible line of trust with the general public. Every now and then, we (Americans) make a collective silent decision about an actor/actress. We love them. We like them. They’re one of us. We’ll follow their lead. Jimmy Stewart. Tom Hanks. Kevin Costner. Well, almost. Even though his streak wasn’t completely over, I feel that JFK marks the end of Costner’s golden age. His next release, 1992’s The Bodyguard, was a huge hit, but more for its soundtrack than anything else. Perhaps sensing a change, Costner took on his first villain/anti-hero role in Clint Eastwood’s criminally underrated 1993 film, A Perfect World. Playing an escaped convict who befriends a young boy, Costner finally gets to show his full range. He’d been the everyman (The Untouchables, Field of Dreams), the charismatic liar (No Way Out), and the sexy rebel (Bull Durham). But with this little movie, shot on the back roads of rural Texas, Costner is able to mix those ingredients together for something new. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen it since.

The Golden Raspberry Award or “Razzie” as it’s better known, is an annual award for the worst in movies, the polar opposite of the Oscars. In 1991, Kevin Costner was awarded the Razzie for “Worst Actor” in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. It was his first nomination and first win. No big deal. The movie made a ton of money. Many great and well-respected actors have had the (dis)honor of taking home a Razzie or two. It happens. But Kevin Costner, through bad luck, bad choices, or a combination of the two, has since received an additional six Razzie nominations for “Worst Actor,” winning twice for Wyatt Earp (1994) and The Postman (1997).

The debacle that was Waterworld has been written and talked about ad nauseum. I have nothing to contribute to the conversation other than to say that it wasn’t as bad as everyone said it would be and it made more money than was expected. As for The Postman? That one will forever be in the WTF file. I’m 32 now. I’m sad to say that for more than half of my life, I’ve been living in a post-Costner world. For many years I held out hope that he would return to form. There were moments. Tin Cup had a Bull Durham-esque appeal. And Costner, who seems to naturally take himself way too seriously, is very appealing when he lightens up and goofs around. Open Range was a good western. Not a great one, but pretty damn good.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year, Costner seemed ready for a vibrant third act. “I don’t give up. I’m a plodder. People come and go, but I stay the course.” Who knows, with the success of Hatfields & McCoys, perhaps some of the sparkle is returning to Costner’s star. Next summer he plays Clark Kent’s father in the hotly anticipated reboot, Man of Steel. But much of the audience, many born in the post-Waterworld era, will have no idea that for a brief but glorious period in my formative years, Kevin Costner was, at least cinematically speaking, Superman himself.

“Everyone accepts that stories and movies are different things.” Indeed. But how, exactly? Is one a higher art form than the other? Does one strengthen children’s brains while the other is more likely to rot them?

Somewhere in the middle of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the eponymous hero, by now several years cast away by himself on a deserted island, is startled awake by the sound a voice other than his own: “Robin, Robin, Robin Crusoe, poor Robin Crusoe, where are you Robin Crusoe? Where are you? Where have you been?”If you have read the novel (or my “Parrots, Pirates, and Protheses” post), you know that this startling voice belongs not to a newly arrived friend or rescuer, but to Poll, Crusoe’s parrot. And it is Poll’s words that I found myself thinking of while watching the second episode of NBC’s television adaption of Defoe’s novel: Poor Robin Crusoe. Where are you? What have they done to you?Those whose appetites for desert island antics and pirate slapstick were not sated by the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, by all means, tune in; Also those who measure entertainment by the number and diversity of booby traps made out of bamboo and rope (a la Indiana Jones): This show’s for you. For those us of us, however, who found ourselves entranced by the novel’s much more modest “dramas,” the show is a buffoonish disappointment.Crusoe’s island adventures in Defoe’s novel, for the most part, are domestic and agrarian. Rather than, “Will Crusoe and Friday free themselves from the curse of the water god’s tomb?” (as NBC’s version offered this week), the novel offers adventures such as “What will Crusoe salvage from the shipwreck before it breaks up?” “Will Crusoe manage to make bread?” “How will Crusoe catch and domesticate goats?” “Who made the single footprint in the sand?”The novel’s adventures are not about reveling in the lawlessness and primitive world in which Crusoe finds himself, but in getting out of that “meer State of Nature” and recreating the most basic domestic comforts of middle class life in late seventeenth century England: a reasonably varied diet, food, clothes, shelter, religion.One such adventure in the novel is making clay vessels for storing water and other necessaries: After two months’ labor, Crusoe manages to make “odd misshapen ugly things,” but of this laborious modest achievement, described in exacting detail by Defoe, Crusoe tells us: “No Joy at a Thing of so mean a Nature was ever equal to mine, when I found I had made an Earthen Pot that would bear the Fire.” And the satisfaction of these small world-making achievements is palpable – page turning – I promise. But when NBC’s adaption begins, these – the real dramas of castaway life – are already long past: Crusoe (Philip Winchester) and Friday (Tongayi Chirisa) are happily settled in an elaborate array of tree houses featuring an astonishing collection of technologically sophisticated contrivances, and Crusoe spends most of the time he is not having duels with busty pirate queens, or scoffing at Friday’s belief in dreams as divine messages (in the novel, it is Crusoe who takes one of his dreams as a sign from Providence), pining for his wife and children back in England (Oh, Robin Crusoe – how little they know of your emotional autism and your utter lack of interest in women, so deftly portrayed in J.M. Coetzee’sCrusoe adaption, Foe).Ironically, NBC’s Robinson Crusoe is redundant. CBS’s Survivor, in its umpteenth season, and ABC’s Lost, going into its fifth, are much more interesting engagements of the Western fascination with castaways and desert islands that Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe began. While Crusoe would seem – because it is explicitly based on the novel that is the original Western fantasy of the castaway (and also a crucial tale in the history of European thinking about man in the state of nature, like Hobbes’Leviathan and Locke’sTwo Treatises) – to trump its predecessors in the realm of desert island television drama, but NBC’s rendering takes only the props and trappings of Defoe’s original and adapts them in Jerry Bruckheimer-y, Gore Verbinski-y, Steven Spielberg-y, George Lucas-y ways: a clownish balancing duet by Crusoe and his man on a stone bridge whose design defies all principles of engineering; jokey banter between Friday and Crusoe while cornered by supernatural tomb-guarding hounds; Friday’s slapstick escape from a pirate orchestrated by shaking a palm tree that brains the pirate with a coconut.Lost and Survivor, by contrast, are much more conscious of Defoe’s preoccupation in his Crusoe, namely, the difficulties of remaking civilization – both socially and materially – out of nothing. Lost dramatizes in genuinely alarming – haunting – ways the fear of the unknown that wracks Crusoe in Defoe’s novel (particularly after he finds a single footprint on the beach much too large to be his own); Survivor, in its admittedly contrived way, is much better at dramatizing the human ingenuity necessary to survive in a state of nature (though Lost attends to this reality of castaway life much more convincingly than Crusoe does as well).In short, if you are looking for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, don’t look for him on NBC. Though if you are looking for Indiana Jones or Jack Sparrow, NBC’s Robinson Crusoe might just be your man.

In the house where I grew up, the child of English teachers, PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre connoted “classiness” in at least two senses. On one hand, its filmed adaptations of classic novels added a touch of literary refinement (and sometimes even of eat-your-vegetables self-improvement) to a television schedule larded with junk food. On the other, it offered a place for us churchmice to indulge our fascination with “class” in the baser sense: idle wealth and posh intrigues and butlers who ring for tea at three.

In America, I’ve lately come to feel, this latter is the love that dare not speak its name. We’re a nation whose hereditary upper class keeps insisting there’s no such thing (see gubernatorial scion and presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney’stweets from Carl’s Jr.), and where even the concept of “class” is dismissed as taboo (see the suggestion, ibid., that income inequality is something best talked about “in quiet rooms”). But Masterpiece, safely couched in the past, and usually overseas, remains one of the public venues where the upper crust, albeit fictional, can exercise their privilege without scruple, and where the rest of us can go to gawk. Those houses! Those costumes! Those accents! (In this light, The Forsyte Saga, which launched the series 41 years ago, appears almost proto-Kardashian.)

The current Masterpiece feature, Downton Abbey, mashes both class buttons hard. In the economic sense, it centers on the Earl of Grantham and his fabulously wealthy family, and on the eighty-eleven-dozen servants who attend to their every whim. On the cultural front, it offers a whiz-bang pastiche of three centuries of English literature. Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess is a venerable type: part Trollope’s Mrs. Proudie, part Thackeray’s Miss Crawley, part Dickens’, Aunt Betsey Trotwood (likewise played by Smith in a Masterpiece adaptation)…maybe with a touch of Professor McGonagall thrown in to keep things lively. Carson the Butler surely owes some of his imperturbability to Wodehouse’s Reginald Jeeves. The central romance, between the earl’s eldest daughter and her cousin Matthew, hews closely to the Jane Austen playbook (though, two episodes into Season 2, it’s still not clear who’s Elizabeth and who’s Mr. Darcy). And Downton Abbey, the titular estate, is like a mash-up of Brideshead and Wuthering Heights.

I doubt any of this is accidental. Downton Abbey‘s creator, Julian Fellowes, has adapted Twain and Thackeray for screens large and small, and has gone so far as to nick the Crawley surname for his own aristocrats. Nor is his erudition limited to English-language literature; this is the kind of show where, when a Turkish character appears, his name is an amalgam of two of the greatest living Turkish novelists: Kemal Pamuk. (I’m still waiting for the American character named Melville von Updike.)

Needless to say, Downton Abbey is also serious fun; it’s become a surprise successor to Friday Night Lights and Mad Men as TV’s current “must-watch” show. But when, in the dead days between finishing Season 1 on DVD and waiting for the premiere of Season 2, I rummaged through my Brit-Lit shelf looking for some upstairs-downstairs action to sustain me, I was shocked by how little of the actual aristocracy I found.

It turns out that my sense of the “classiness” of the English novel is like my sense of the monolithic “classiness” of English elocution — that I suffer from a kind of cognitive foreshortening, wherein important distinctions disappear. In fact, what the English novel is overwhelmingly about, in class terms, is not the hereditary nobility but the middle classes: the downwardly mobile landowners, the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie.

Granted, the English class terminology is hopelessly confusing (sort of the way over there “public school” means private school.) But consider the seminal novels of the 1700s. Richardson’sClarissa may moon around a swell house, but she hails from a family of arrivistes. And though Fielding’sTom Jones lives with Squire Allworthy — a member of the landed gentry, if I’ve got my terminology correct — he does so as “a foundling.”

Then there’s the 19th century. Mr. Darcy, with his £10,000 income, could probably give Allworthy a literal run for his money, but his Pemberley estate is more the Maguffin in Pride & Prejudice than its setting; Jane Austen’s eye keeps returning to the raffish Bennets. Or take the Bröntes. We experience the grandeur of Rochester’s Thornfield Hall only through the eyes of Jane Eyre, the governess. Class roles are more fluid in Wuthering Heights, but between Heathcliff and Catherine, one is always on the way up and the other on the way down. Even Thackeray’s Crawleys, with their titles, are really supporting characters. The main attractions in Vanity Fair are the upper-middle-class Amelia Sedley and the scheming Becky Sharp. And perhaps the very greatest of the 19th-century English novels, Middlemarch, declares its allegiances right there in the title.

It’s possible to account for the English canon’s emphasis on the middle purely as a matter of dramatic interest. Unlike earls and princes and duchesses, the gentry and the striving bourgeoisie are people with places to go, with something to gain…and to lose. Still, compare the English novel of this period with the Russian — all those counts! — or with Proust’s elaborate explication of the Guermantes line, and you remember that aristocrats have plenty to lose, too, starting with reputation. (Indeed, questions of reputation animate some of Downton Abbey‘s key plotlines.) And surely readerly interest in lifestyles of the rich and fabulous isn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, I suspect that the overlay of aristocratic intrigue in a novel like Vanity Fair is an attempt to satisfy it.

But the rise of the English novel parallels historically the rise of the middle classes; these are the classes from which most of the great novelists hailed, and to whose upper reaches their profession would have limited them. Dickens, one of Karl Marx’s favorite writers, offers the archetype of Victorian social cartography. Sure, you’ve got your Lord and Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, but more often the aristocrats resemble the generic Oodle and Boodle and Noodle, who in Little Dorrit form a kind of choral backdrop to a foreground of slums and inventors’ workshops and banks and debtors’ prisons.

To really get your fill of the aristocracy in between visits to Downton, you might look to the second tier of the 19th-century canon. There’s Eliot’s brilliant but flawed Daniel Deronda; there are Trollope’s Palliser novels and some of the Barsetshire ones. (There are also glimmerings of nobility throughout the top-shelf corpus of that American interloper, Henry James.)

Or, interestingly, you could just move on to the 20th century, in whose early years Downton Abbey is set. For here and only here, with the aristocracy in decline, does it move to the center of the English novel. (I guess you don’t really miss something until it’s gone.) Waugh’sBrideshead Revisited and Ford Madox Ford’sParade’s End are palpably influences on Downton Abbey. In each, a sense of nostalgia for the days of real privilege hang heavy; in each the shifting sands under the aristocracy’s castles are viewed through the prism of war. Portions of Anthony Powell’sA Dance to the Music Of Time likewise concern the titled classes. I’ve not read At Lady Molly’s, but I might well be forced to turn to it a couple of months from now, when I’m once again going through Downton Withdrawal. Perhaps the single most Downton-y book I know of — I’d be shocked if Mr. Fellowes (er…Sir Julian) hadn’t read it — is Henry Green’s miraculous short novel Loving, from 1945. Green’s beautifully impacted idiom is short on exposition, and when I picked up Loving a few weeks ago, I found it enriched by the hours I’d spent in Fellowes’ world. That is, I suddenly understood the difference between a head housemaid and a lady’s maid.

The two most astute novelists of class currently working in England, I think, are Edward St. Aubyn and Alan Hollinghurst. St. Aubyn hails from the social stratosphere himself, and the terrific first three novels in his Patrick Melrose cycle — Never Mind, Bad News, and Some Hope — detail what’s happened to the Granthams of the world three or four generations on from Downton. Spoiler alert: the titles and the dough still linger, but the culture has moved on, leaving in its wake terrible boredom and worse behavior. Hollinghurst’s finest novel, The Line of Beauty, can’t properly be said to center on the aristocracy, but retains some of Waugh’s nostalgia (and much of the flavor of mid-to-late period James). Who has replaced the hereditary nobility, at the top of Margaret Thatcher’s England? Callow politicians and oil millionaires. Still, like a title and a castle, parliamentary clout and petro-pounds are not available to everyone, and so our protagonist, Nick Guest, occupies a familiar position: nose pressed to the glass.

In the end, this is the secret to Downton Abbey’s success, as well. The glamour of the earldom draws us in, but it’s the vividly realized characters who surround it — especially the servants below-stairs — that hold it in perspective, and so give it life. We live now in the Age of Austerity, and as a sometime practitioner of what Romney has called “the bitter politics of envy,” I feel a little weird being enthralled with this show. But then I look at what else my poor TV has to offer, and I find myself murmuring, Burgundy-style, “Stay classy, Downton!”

8 comments:

Kevin Costner’s problem is that he thinks he’s a better director than every director he works with, which is why he never works with great directors, save one or two at the beginning of his career. That best director oscar was the worst thing that ever happened to him, because it was undeserved, and deep down he knows it, but he can’t let go of the idea that he is Henry Fonda and John Ford all rolled into one. Why he got pass for Waterworld and The Postman while Michael Cimino was consigned to director’s purgatory is something I will never understand. Plus, he’s a dick. Everyone knows he’s a dick.

The thing about Robin Hood was that his British accent was laughable, which just reminded everyone that there was hubris at work here. Hubris and pure star power, which is an abuse forever forgiven if the end product is awesome — and never forgiven if it’s lame like Robin Hood.

After a weak year for movies, this Sunday’s Academy Awards promises more than the usual number of surprises. Will we watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button rack up 13 Oscars, eclipsing Ben-Hur… or will we watch it edge out The Color Purple for a dubious record: most nominations without a single award? Will we thrill to the wit and wisdom of austerity-measures host Hugh Jackman… or will we find ourselves longing for the deft comedic timing of Charlton Heston? What we surely won’t see is a sweep for the film version of Revolutionary Road, which strikes me as more startling than any of the scenarios outlined above. To put it bluntly: Revolutionary Road is pure Oscar bait. It boasts a powerhouse production team (director Sam Mendes, cinematographer Roger Deakins, and co-producer Scott Rudin) and a terrific ensemble cast. It has the kind of marketing hook Oscar loves: it’s Kate and Leo’s first joint outing since The Highest Grossing Film of All Time.Most importantly (with apologies to The Reader and Ben Button) it has the most impeccable literary pedigree of any movie released this year. “Hollywood is a visual town that reveres what it reads,” as The New Yorker’sTad Friend wrote a few years back. “A classy book connotes New York, taste, and depth.” And yet, when the nominations were announced last month, Revolutionary Road was up for a paltry three statuettes. What gives? The most plausible explanation is some sort of baroque intra-Academy intrigue of the sort that robbed Bruce Springsteen of a nomination for The Wrestler. But I’d like to suggest, for the sake of argument, that the problem lies in the source material – that Revolutionary Road, the novel by Richard Yates, may, for fairly interesting reasons, be unadaptable.Revolutionary Road now looks like some kind of high-water-mark of urbane fiction. Soon after its publication, loose, baggy monsters such as Giles Goat-Boy and Gravity’s Rainbow would seize the high ground of literary fiction, reflecting the entropic tendencies of the larger culture. But in 1961, the novel still seemed perfectible, and with this book Richard Yates came as close as anyone has to perfecting it. A synopsis sounds straightforward: Frank and April Wheeler settle in suburban Connecticut at the peak of the postwar boom, only to find themselves spiritually and aesthetically ill-at-ease with their surroundings. They dream of being something more than (respectively) a Man in a Gray Flannel Suit and a housewife. Yet their pursuit of the numinous will threaten to destroy them.This story is easily caricatured, by those who haven’t bothered to read the book, as a denunciation of suburban life – precisely the sort of novel Frank Wheeler might have written. Yates makes painfully clear, however, that the obstacles the Wheelers face are as much internal as external. An ironist of almost infinite subtlety, he spends much of the book revealing Frank and April’s grasping as no less “hopeless” and “empty” than the neat little subdivision streets that give the book its title. Whatever greatness they possess falls victim to their self-absorption.For all its bleakness, Revolutionary Road is often quite funny. The mediating principle between the comedy and the tragedy, the satire and the sympathy, is Yates’ pitch-perfect voice. His free indirect narration hews for the most part to Frank’s point-of-view, so that even as we see Frank’s posturing, we are drawn into sympathy with him. At times, the subjectivity of Yates’ descriptions borders on the visionary:How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their gray-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! . . . . The waiting midtown office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.Even as Frank sees his town-and-country life as “comical,” his eye (for “canyons”, for manly “containment,” for those supreme clouds) betrays its attractions. Flattering himself as a man apart, he is acting out his own “passionate little dumb show.” This foible is, of course, not unique to Frank. And as with Jonathan Franzen’s Lamberts forty years later, we can’t sit securely in judgment; we don’t even quite know where to stand.All of which is to say that I was concerned when Sam Mendes – surely one of our most portentous filmmakers – was directing Revolutionary Road: The Movie. It seemed likely that Mendes might miss the irony and give us American Beauty meets American Graffiti: a jeremiad against the Cold War dorps of the Metro North. True to form, Mendes does go a bit crazy with the foliage toward the end of the movie; it’s as if he believes that beauty (and his films are beautiful, in a way that sometimes borders on kitsch) only serves as a mask for the general hideousness of human beings. For the most part, though, my fears were unfounded. Mendes is as finely attuned to the posturings of Frank and April as he is to the fatuousness of their real estate agent and the generic idyll of their neighborhood.Moreover, the acting in Revolutionary Road is excellent. Kathy Bates, Michael Shannon, and Zoe Kazan turn in fine supporting performances. DiCaprio takes a little getting used to – he still looks like a teenager to me – but as he grows into the lead role, he reveals the depths of Frank’s frustration. And the great Kate Winslett turns in a terrifically intense performance as April. Mendes, who is her husband, loves to fill the screen with her, and for good reason.The film earns its nomination for an Art Direction Oscar. It is lovingly upholstered, filled with the trappings of the Eisenhower era. (Rarely does a scene pass without its complement of martinis and coffees and cigarettes; no wonder these people are so moody.) Despite (or perhaps because of) its reverence for its source material, however, the movie misses the key ingredient: the voice. Subjectivity is easy for a novel to do; indeed, we might say that objectivity in fiction is merely an illusion. Film, however, is relentlessly literal, and Mendes never bothers to figure out a way to finesse this – to give us that “great silent insectarium,” for example.He does offer compelling interpretations of certain scenes, the way one might interpret Shakespeare or Chekhov. He is particularly interested in the constraints April suffers because of her gender. But Yates is not a playwright, he’s a novelist, and the magic of this particular novel is its ability to take us inside its characters. Only in the final seconds of the film does Mendes abandon his handsome neutrality and attempt to figure out how to make film do what literature does. It is too little, too late.And so one ends up wondering, what’s the point? Revolutionary Road, the movie, has resisted the temptation to condemn a particular set of social circumstances; instead it has gone to the other extreme, making Frank and April’s problems so particular that it seems to have little to say to anyone who isn’t them. The solution to their unhappiness? Suck less.Up against this year’s other Oscar bait, Revolutionary Road holds up fine. But it has to meet a higher hurdle: it’s up against a great book. For all its fine craftsmanship, its entertainment value, its essential dignity, it doesn’t add anything. Unlike Yates’ novel, it does not command our sympathy; it merely commands our gaze.Bonus link:Your printable Oscar ballot (pdf)